Digital twin · GIS · aviation
YVR Digital Twin
A living digital model of Vancouver International Airport, fusing GIS, operational data and 3D visualization into a shared, real-time picture of the terminal and airfield.
Software architecture and delivery — Vancouver, BC
AI enablement and digital twins, delivered — not just diagrammed.
42ENG builds AI-enabled data pipelines, deploys on-premises AI infrastructure, and trains domain-specific models — for gateways: airports, ports and borders, where generic cloud AI does not fit.
Digital twin
YVR Digital Twin
Vancouver International Airport
Border control
BorderXpress
Automated passport control kiosks
Machine learning
Stand-occupancy pipeline
CCTV inference on existing cameras
What 42ENG does
Four practices. One standard: it ships.
Strategy decks do not move baggage, clear passengers, or answer support tickets. Every engagement is scoped around working software in production, with the infrastructure and operational domain knowledge to back it up.
01
AI enablement
Practical AI — not a roadmap, not a proof-of-concept that never scales. Three areas of work.
AI-enabled data pipelines. Ingestion, enrichment and inference wired into operational workflows, not bolted on afterwards.
On-premises AI infrastructure. Model serving, GPU orchestration and private inference for organizations that cannot send operational data to a third-party cloud.
Model training and fine-tuning. Domain-specific models trained on your data, for tasks where a generic foundation model underperforms or a prompt is not enough.
02
Digital twins
A digital twin is only useful when it answers operational questions faster than a radio call. 42ENG built Vancouver International Airport's twin — GIS, live operational feeds and 3D visualization integrated into one decision tool, with an owner and a runbook rather than a demonstration.
03
Operations-domain systems
Earned domain depth across gateways. Passenger processing, biometrics and automated border control; customs and aerospace metadata, GIS, and the operational data that ties a terminal together; marine and port operations, where the same constraints apply under a different vocabulary. Built for the environment where downtime is measured in queue length.
04
Architecture and delivery leadership
Embedded ownership of the outcome, from system design through team execution to production handover. Senior capability without a senior hiring cycle, and a documented handover at the end of it.
Selected work
Proof, not promises.
Production systems delivered across aviation, border control and marine gateways.
Biometrics · border control
BorderXpress
Automated passport control kiosks processing millions of international passengers — biometrics and image processing in one of the least forgiving production environments there is.
Gateway engagement · under NDA
Marine and border systems
Operational data and sensor pipeline work for a West Coast gateway. The client is not named; the pattern is the same one the airport work follows.
Some engagements are covered by non-disclosure and appear here unnamed.
About
Senior enough to lead. Hands-on enough to commit code.
42ENG is led by Dennis Johnston, a software architect and delivery leader based in Vancouver, BC, working with a bench of associates brought in to fit the engagement. The firm started as a one-man show in the early dotcom days and has been building and delivering systems for North American clients ever since — airport digital twins, border-control kiosks, marine sensor pipelines.
The through-line: complex, operations-heavy domains where software has to work the first time and keep working. Today that increasingly means helping organizations adopt AI with the same discipline — grounded in their data, wired into their operations, and measured by outcomes rather than announcements.
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Have a system that needs to exist?
Whether it is an AI initiative that needs to get real, a gateway program that needs domain depth, or a delivery that needs a competent owner — start with a conversation.
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